ABSTRACT
During most of the fi fteenth century and the early sixteenth, much francophone writing was produced outside France itself. Around the Dukes of Burgundy, and their Hapsburg successors, clustered numerous poets and chroniclers, based mostly in the Burgundian Netherlands. Not all these writers had an equal political engagement; not all necessarily saw themselves as Burgundian rather than French; but they all owed allegiance, for part of their careers at least, to a state independent of France. Political power-relations inevitably informed the publication and reception of these writers in manuscript and print, in both France and francophone Burgundian areas. I shall examine the ways in which these power relations affect Burgundian writing when it is printed in France; when, in other words, it becomes subject to the political sensibilities of a new public and to economic and technological imperatives. Such issues concern not only the ‘demographics’ of publication (which texts were printed, when and where), but also the infl ections of textual presentation and variation. Sometimes these infl ections derive from authorial interventions into publication; more often, they are symptoms of reception; but in all cases, they signifi cantly infl uence readers. I focus upon the work of three particularly important Burgundian authors: the successive holders of the post of indiciaire, offi cial court poet and historiographer, a post which had no direct equivalent in France and which gave them an institutional status unmatched by other writers.1 In various ways, the printed presentation of these authors’ works attenuates elements which might be seen as dissident in a French context.
